1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a nozzle plate having a liquid repellent surface, a liquid ejecting head, and a liquid ejecting apparatus.
2. Related Art
Liquid ejecting apparatuses are equipped with a liquid ejecting head including a nozzle plate having nozzles, which eject various types of liquid. A typical example of such liquid ejecting apparatuses is an image recording apparatus, such as an ink jet printer or ink jet plotter. The configuration of the liquid ejecting apparatus enables extremely small droplets of liquid to be accurately landed at predetermined positions and has thus recently been applied to various manufacturing apparatuses. Examples of such manufacturing apparatuses include display manufacturing apparatuses that fabricate color filters of, for example, liquid crystal displays, electrode forming apparatuses that form electrodes of, for example, organic electroluminescence (EL) displays and field emission displays (FEDs), and chip manufacturing apparatuses that fabricate biochips. A recording head for the image recording apparatus ejects liquid ink, and a color-filter-material ejecting head for the display manufacturing apparatus ejects solutions of the respective color filter materials of red (R), green (G), and blue (B). An electrode material ejecting head for the electrode forming apparatus ejects an electrode material in a liquid state, and a bioorganic-material ejecting head for the chip manufacturing apparatus ejects a solution of a bioorganic material.
In such liquid ejecting apparatuses, some liquid droplets ejected from the nozzles may adhere to the surface (specifically, the surface from which the droplets are ejected) of the nozzle plate. In particular, the liquid adhering to the vicinities of the nozzles may cause problems, such as varying the trajectories of the droplets ejected from the nozzles due to the interference between the adhering liquid and the droplets. In order to reduce such problems, a liquid ejecting head that includes a nozzle plate having a liquid repellent film on the surface thereof has been disclosed (refer to JP-A-2014-124874).
Some of the liquid ejecting apparatuses are equipped with a wiping member (for example, a wiper) for wiping the surface of the nozzle plate to remove, for example, the ink and contaminants adhering to the surface of the nozzle plate. The wiping operation of the wiping member, however, may abrade the liquid repellent film on the nozzle plate surface, resulting in a reduction in the liquid repellency property of the nozzle plate surface. In particular, in the case where the liquid ejected from the nozzles contains a pigment, such as titanium oxide, this pigment functions as an abrasive material and more readily abrades the liquid repellent film.